Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine "The Anime Thread" Thread

Now that I've been watching for a while, I suppose I should say something.

Most manga readers watched anime first. I'm the other way. I've only been watching for less than a year.

Recently finished:

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha - I'm the perfect target audience. Cardcaptor Sakura gained a secondary adult male fanbase. I was one of them, but wanted a series with more feeling of actual danger. Nanoha is tailored perfectly for that. It starts out almost parodying Sakura but quickly sets its own path, cutting through some of the Magical Girl conventions and pumping up the action. I like the first two seasons, though it's by no means perfect.
The tech-magic isn't cool; it's annoying. It would be cool if they let this be a Clarke's 3rd Law universe, either by saying all magic is science or by saying they're indistinguishable. They continue to insist there's a difference while the magic feels ever more like science and is also continuously demonstrated to be magic.
StrikerS (Season 3) abruptly goes downhill. This is no longer even pretending to be a Magical Girl show, and it loses what's appealing about that. It's just a sci-fi superhero show with bad worldbuilding.

Kaleido Star - Japanese girl comes to SoCal to perform in a pseudo- Cirque du Soleil.
I have nothing against genuine shojo; I think I prefer a good shojo to a good shonen. Yes, it's often painfully unconvincing how this series depicts showbiz. It still has something good that shines through. If the defining characteristic of shojo is romance and of shonen is trying to be the best at something, this is shonen. The stunts and action, like martial arts in so many shows, do push into the impossible and into outright mystic powers. (You're probably better off watching it knowing that from the start; I wasn't really expecting that and didn't like it.)
And Naegino Sora is major crush material for this guy who always favors the nice girl.

Currently on:

Dai Mahou Touge (Magical Witch Punie-chan; I recall hearing Panzer Princess as an alternate title, and it's just as appropriate) - Just about to finish. Nutty, but I wish I could find a Japanese comedy that was both funny and made some sense. As with Nanoha, the problem is that it claims to be a Magical Girl show (in this case, a parody) but isn't.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo - Isn't this the same studio that did Romeo X Juliet and Samurai Seven? (Haven't seen those.) It could be described as "Dumas's classic in space", but that would lead you to imagine something totally different from what it is. I'm not sure I like it.

Revolutionary Girl Utena - Just started. I've been consciously avoiding spoilers even since before I ever expected to watch it.
I knew it was slashy, but the first episode looks like a full-on yuri show. (Not that I have anything against that...)
Ugh, old shojo art. (It's a bit odd that manga/anime fandom refers to 1990s series as "old".)

I was a huge fan of Cardcaptors/Cardcaptor Sakura. I belonged to at least three websites dedicated to CLAMP (the company that made it). Sadly, none of their other series appealed to me as much as Cardcaptor Sakura did.

I'm not a big fan of anime/manga. There are influences from it in my own work, but I've never really followed it in any way.
Akira and Ghost in the Machine are really the only two movies I can think of off the top of my head that I've watched.

Ooh, you've been watching some good ones, TK.

I'm a big fan of "KaleidoStar." Since you like it, I'd recommend tracking down "Angelic Layer." "Gankutsuo" is very cool. I loved the look of it, and I thought it had a strong story throughout. "Uetna" -- wow, that's just a major mind-blower. It was a little too weird for me, but I know a lot of people loved it, which is why it's finally getting a major re-release.

After finishing Utena, I decided I don't like genuine surrealism. Morrisonian wackiness, yes, most of the time. Utena looks dreamlike by the end, things changing if you take your eye off them.

I got thinking about something broader. Why is otaku culture so recentist?

Western fan culture appears to have been largely codified by Star Trek. Nostalgia plays some significant part in it.
What's really strange is that both Japanese fan culture and Western otaku are more recentist than other Western fans. It makes sense why Western otaku focus on modern series. Anime and manga imports only really exploded around 10 years ago. This begs the question of why mostly recent (at the time) series were translated. They were all new to English speakers...
And it's not just a case of fans not getting what they want. Even fan translations focus on recent works; the majority of pre-1990s material appears to be untranslated.
If there's a show that Kaleido Star would make me want to see, it's Hikari no Densetsu. Why in the name of *%#&)@&) can't there be an English version?
Speaking of that, I've noticed something. There were many more anime imports to continental Europe in the 70s and 80s than there were to English-speaking countries. Most of them still haven't seen English release. It's not just the quantity that's interesting, though. Many were shoujo series at a time when English-language anime seems to have been shounen action and science fiction.
On the subject of shoujo, why did Sailor Moon manage an (anecdotally at least) significant boys' audience in its English release? Don't know about the original Japanese. I sort of get how a girls' show can get a secondary adult male audience - see my previous comment about Sakura and the reason for Nanoha's faux-shoujo existence. Incidentally, I notice that I'm much more interested in shoujo than in the younger-targeted shounen series. Anyway, though I didn't see Sailor Moon - or any other 90s anime when it was new - I can't see myself rejecting anything because it was aimed at girls. It was a dislike of the animation style that applied just as much to shounen series that kept me away then.

Samurai X is still my favorite. Heard a remake's in progress; that would rock.

Almost everyone I know who watches anime or reads manga has high praise for that series. Even my grandma likes it.

TK - not an expert on anime by any means, so I can't really make any highly intelligent conjectures about that. But have there been major changes in anime over the decades? You pose an interesting question that I'd love to see more answers on.

(I was repeatedly expanding the last post - tend to do that with long posts on message boards, to avoid timeouts or errors. Sometimes messes things up if someone's actually reading as you're writing. So I'll continue my planned post here...)

But I assumed something being aimed at girls would be more a turnoff for other audiences than it seems to be in anime.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2006-10-04/top-10-anime-and-manga-at-japan-media-arts-festival
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2006-10-13/japan%27s-favorite-tv-anime
The recentism in these lists is insane. I'd expect there to be more series the Japanese loved that had never caught on here.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2011-10-07
I suppose I'm enough out of step with otaku culture to not understand this.
I know at least some of it is about the art. This isn't so much a concern for me, but I can see how that's due to my specific history. I got into anime from manga, and into manga after Western comics. Though they're more similar in animation quality, Western comics have manga beat on art and production values, always have. That is, I didn't get into manga for the art.
Regarding what I said at first about Utena - I don't mind the art. At least on the female characters. Interestingly, that calls to mind Tenchi Muyo, where the art's alright for the male characters, but I don't like the look of the girls - and that's a harem comedy. The art was one of the things turning me off it, but what made me quit was how lame the comedy was.
And regarding animation quality, maybe something else affecting my perception is that prior to 2010, I hadn't regularly watched any conventionally animated TV series since... 1997?

Most of the series I've seen are relatively recent, but it kind of has to be that way, doesn't it? Come to think of it, most pre-1990 anime I've heard of don't sound very interesting. I can't remember everything I see mentioned to make a statistical analysis. I get the impression that most older series I know of are aimed rather young. Also, some genres I like weren't well developed then.

I have to admit being surprised at the amount of '90s/'00s anime merchandise I encountered in Chicago's Chinatown. There were Cardcaptor Sakura pencil cases on sale, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles posters, and even Sailor Moon notebooks.

Someone once said, and it may have been TV tropes, that anime aimed towards boys will always be more readily picked up by Western companies than anime aimed towards girls. There are certain behaviors and cultural norms acceptable in Japan which would be considered unacceptable in the United States.

I know it probably does not count as anime, but Sanrio has done extraordinarily well at maintaining it's brand for over twenty years.

Talking to a non-anime-watching friend, I got this suggestion for recentism. Fans want to be able to discuss the shows they're watching with other fans who are simultaneously watching. Thus the emphasis on watching shows in the first run, something I can't care about. No, that's wrong. I care about *not* doing that because I no longer have the memory or attention span to watch a whole TV series at the rate it's produced.